Altair Manchester City Prepaid Card offer Discounts when you use

Manchester City Prepaid Card

Manchester City FC prepaid Season card with PayPass from Altair Financial Services , 18 March 2008. The Manchester city card has been delivered by Altair Prepaid cards services to launch Manchester City prepaid card which is a FC Season card with PayPass™

LONDON, 18 March 2008: Altair Financial Services International Plc (Altair) have helped deliver the first stadium contactless prepaid card in Europe. Where the new season card by Manchester City prepaid MasterCard will be replacing the supporters current standard season card ticket. The new season card prepaid card will include PayPass and is backed by MBNA and MasterCard.

“We are delighted to have delivered such an innovative and remarkable payment card program, which is among the most technically advanced in the world today,” says Lee Britton, Altair CEO. “The cards make use of EMV functionality, which has never been implemented on a prepaid card program before, enabling the cards to manage their own authorisation activity when used at contactless terminals.”

Manchester City Card

The Manchester City FC MasterCard Prepaid Season card, currently on trial with 3,500 season ticket holders, combines for the first time three applications in a single piece of plastic. The card stores membership data and is capable of interfacing contactless to the Manchester City Stadium turnstiles to allow entry to home matches, it also supports standard Chip and PIN payments and contactless payments with MasterCard PayPass.

“Essentially, a cardholder could use their card to enter the stadium and pay for their halftime meal and drinks by simply tapping their card with contactless enabled merchants. In addition, cardholders can use their card outside of the stadium to make purchases with their card at both chip and PIN and contactless point of sale devices.

Brendan Jones, Product Executive at MBNA, said: “The season card by Manchester City prepaid MasterCard with Paypass is a great innovation in stadium technology. We believe this concept will work both inside and outside of stadia, and will revolutionise the way people use cash.”

Chris Reddish, Global Product Head of Prepaid Europe, MasterCard, said, "The power a Season card is that it combines the openness and availability of prepaid with the speed and execution of a PayPass transaction.”

The contactless card concept has been proven by millions of passengers globally that use RFID enabled cards for public transit daily. TheManchester City prepaid MasterCard is the first of the next generation entry control cards that offer speed and convenience both on entry and on purchases once inside the stadium. Altair believes stadia, sports and music events are next in line to take advantage of the benefits of implementing similar prepaid contactless card programs.

Products like this have huge benefits to stadium owners, as they not only combine membership management, access control and an open loop payment product into a single easily manageable piece of plastic, but also have huge benefits to stadium owners with their potential to remove cash from the stadium environment which can be a major time and money overhead.

The card supports EMV scripting which allows Altair to dynamically update data held on board the card when it is used in a Chip and PIN reader. This is a powerful tool which allows management of individual cards, in support of fraud control, offline balance management, card blocking and so forth.

Richard Pinnick, Head of Global Strategic Projects at Fortress GB, the company responsible for the provision of the application that controls membership and access to the stadium commented, “The coexistence of multiple applications, managed by different organisations, on a single MasterCard represents a quantum step forward in thinking for the card industry, simply driven by the needs of the fan. It opens the way to new and innovative card programmes that deliver a multiplicity of functions and services that best fit the lifestyle and environment of the consumer”.